Queensland University of Technology

About the Partner

Business Process Management forms one of three Research Disciplines in QUT’s Information Systems School, which is one of six Schools within the Science and Engineering Faculty. QUT is ranked higher than any other university in Australia (2008–2012) for research productivity by publications and international citation analysis in the top eight Information Systems journals worldwide. QUT has also produced more award-winning doctorate students in Information Systems than any other Australian university with three of the last seven students being awarded the best Australian PhD thesis in Information Systems coming from QUT. The internal standing of BPM at QUT is evidenced by the fact that two of the three most cited papers of QUT of all times are co-authored by QUT’s BPM researchers. Our solid reputation has led to the university successfully hosting an edition of the most significant conference in this discipline, the 5th International Business Process Management Conference (2007), and this year the discipline will host the 2nd Asia-Pacific Business Process Management Conference (2014).

In alignment with QUT’s brand of being a Real World university, our research portfolio is inspired by industry-relevant challenges that we approach with unconditional rigor ultimately targeting the world’s most prestigious academic journals and conferences. A few selected projects are outlined in the following.

Process Innovation – While BPM capabilities related to process analysis have substantially matured current BPM methods and tools provide very limited support with regards to the actual improvement of processes. This research covers the development of process improvement patterns, design-led process innovation and how emerging technologies such as mobile, social or cloud computing can lead to innovative processes.

BPM Strategy and Governance – QUT developed a BPM maturity model with substantial impact on BPM academics and professionals. Our related research studies how BPM can be strategically aligned, i.e. value-driven Business Process Management. This also covers the identification of forms of BPM governance appropriate for the specific ambitions of the BPM initiative.

Workflow Patterns – QUT contributed to this well-known initiative which influenced commercial and open-source tools as well as the widely adopted BPMN 2.0 standard. The patterns provide a rich repository of typical modelling problems and corresponding solutions. The original journal paper on the control-flow patterns is one of the highest cited papers in the field.

The YAWL initiative – YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is a powerful workflow language, based on the workflow patterns, and corresponding open-source support environment of which the development is driven from QUT. The YAWL environment has been used in industry, and in teaching in more than thirty tertiary education institutions in the world.

BPM in Selected Industries – In close collaboration with our industry partners, we study the specific requirements and context-specific challenges related to the design, implementation and execution of business processes in diverse industries such as retail, airports, government, health care, finance and even the film industry. This also includes higher education, i.e. our very own research is deployed in the context of QUT’s business processes.

Advanced Process Modeling – The popularity of BPM has led to the emergence of large model repositories used for multiple purposes by a variety of stakeholders. QUT’s related research is concentrated on the design of advanced ways to manage such model collections including automated process correctness and similarity checks. This work also examines user experiences in the design and use of process models and innovative ways to visualize process models in virtual environments.

Process Mining – The availability of big process data in the form of event logs facilitates sophisticated process analyses. Our research is centred on how to derive process models and related process risks and costs from such data. Further work is related to cross-organisational process performance comparison and process deviance mining. QUT has been involved in the application of process mining in the insurance and healthcare sectors.

Key People

Prof. Michael Rosemann is Professor and Head of the Information Systems School at QUT. His research is focused on creating exciting future worlds with today’s possibilities that make current practices obsolete. Michael’s key contributions are the concept of a series of innovation patterns, value-driven BPM, customer process management, BPM as a service, a BPM maturity model, guidelines of business process modelling, configurable reference models, ambidextrous BPM and context aware BPM. Michael’s PhD students have won the Australian award for the best PhD thesis in Information Systems in 2007, 2008 and 2010. His paper on ‘Toward improving the relevance of information systems research to practice: the role of applicability checks‘, published in the MIS Quarterly (2008) (with Iris Vessey), won the Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Awards for 2012, i.e. it has been chosen as one of the top 50 articles with proven impact since its publication date from the top 300 management journals in the world.

Michael is an internationally recognized leader in Information Systems research demonstrated by:

  • Invited as keynote at the International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2008 – Milan, Italy), the South-American BPM Conference (Santiago, Chile, 2012), at Gartner BPM Summits (2011, 2012, 2013, Sydney; 2013, London), the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit (2012, Sydney), the IRM UK BPM/EA Conference (2012, London), the combined EMMSAD/BPMDS conferences 2012 (Gdansk), the ProzessLab Konferenz (Frankfurt, 2013), the inaugural Business Building Capability conference in Sydney (2012) and the S-BPM conference (Eichstaett, 2014);
  • Between 2009 & 2012 he conducted annual BPM roadshows in Brazil for ELO Group;
  • Since 1999, he is conducting Operations Management courses at the Northern Institute of Technology, Hamburg.
  • Co-founder and co-chair of the international Business Process Design workshop since 2005.
  • Ran invited research seminars at universities around the globe including ANU Canberra, Monash University, University of Melbourne, TU Munich, Louisiana State University, Stevens Institute of Technology, CELAP Shanghai, Nanjing University Singapore and IIT Delhi among others;
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the Software Engineering Research Centre, Jiantong University, Beijing, China.
  • Awarded over $9.9million from ARC, CRC government and industry funding since 2004;
  • Publication of over 390 academic book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, reports and manuals;
  • h-index of 49 and i10-index of 162 with over 9805 citations;
  • Supervision of 10 higher degree research completions (9 PhDs) over 10 years and currently supervising 12 higher degree research students (10 PhDs).